His most famous heist (for all the wrong reasons) was the October 6, 1911 robbery of a Missouri Pacific train. Intending to rob a train carrying thousands of dollars, McCurdy accidentally robbed a passenger train instead (due to a delay holding his original target up). The total haul turned out to be $46 and some liquor. A small posse found him in a barn a few days later. After he refused to surrender, they opened fire. Unsurprisingly, Elmer McCurdy did not survive.

The thing is, the “family member” (one source claims it was two people) was actually someone who worked for a carnival and lied about their identity in order to get the body. McCurdy’s stint at the carnival foreshadowed his being sold from business to business and appearing in a long string of sideshows, “crime museums,” haunted houses and the like over the decades. At one point, he came into possession of legendary exploitation film producer/director Dwain Esper, who allegedly used him as a prop in several films! So far, I’ve only been able to confirm his use in Narcotic (thanks to sample pages from Mark Svenvold’s Elmer Mccurdy: The Life And Afterlife Of An American Outlaw on Amazon). In fact, his body was also displayed in the lobbies of theaters playing said film as a “victim of drug abuse!”